In this searingly honest LGBTQ+ memoir, Maeve DuVally tells the story of coming out transgender in one of the most high-profile financial institutions in America, Goldman Sachs.When Maeve DuVally came out as a transgender woman while working as a corporate communications manager at one of the most renowned financial institutions in America, she knew she couldn't do it quietly. She was, after all, the face of Goldman Sachs. DuVally intimately documents her struggle to be herself in this environment, initially keeping her identity a secret with wardrobe changes in the lobby bathroom after work. Eventually she declares herself and, to her surprise, Goldman Sachs embraces the effort. Surgery follows. When DuVally finally takes those first steps on heels through the corridors of this institution on the way to her first meeting with her team as a woman, the reader cheers. A New York Times story helped DuVally realize she could become a role model for other transgender people in corporations and branded Goldman Sachs as a model for corporations assisting their transitioning employees. Before she found her courage, DuVally's life was mired in depression and unconscious struggle. Raised in an Irish Catholic family with a sadistic pathologist father, her upbringing dropped her―already damaged and feeling separate―into an adulthood plagued by alcoholism. After a decade in Japan, she returns to the US and prospers as a journalist and bank communications specialist. Yet throughout, her personal life is in shambles, leaving two marriages and three children in her wake. At Goldman Sachs in New York, she ascends to a top communications position before her drinking begins to encroach upon her work.
Finally, DuVally hits bottom, becoming sober after a lifetime in and out of AA and rehab. Clear at last, she begins to understand the source of her lifelong struggle and takes the bold step to become the woman she is now.
